GOP, Dems dumb down impeachment

President Richard Nixon was in the White House from 1969 to 1974, when he became the first president to resign from office. He died at 81 in 1994.

Nixon was born in California on January 9, 1913. He is pictured at age 4.

As a teenager, Nixon poses for a portrait with a violin in 1927.

Nixon, No. 12, and his football teammates at Whittier College pose for a picture in the 1930s. After graduating from Whittier, he attended law school at Duke University.

During World War II, Nixon served as a lieutenant commander in the Navy.

Nixon, far right, stands next to John F. Kennedy and other freshmen members of Congress in 1947.

Republican presidential nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower and his running mate, Richard Nixon, with their wives at the Republican National Convention in Chicago on July 12, 1952. The Eisenhower-Nixon ticket won the election that year.

Vice President Nixon, right, and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, center, share a laugh during Nixon's visit to the Soviet Union in 1959. The two leaders engaged in an informal debate about the merits of capitalism versus communism at the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow.

Nixon poses for a portrait with his wife, Pat, and their daughters, Tricia and Julie, circa 1958.

Vice President Nixon and Sen. John F. Kennedy take part in a televised debate during their 1960 presidential campaign. Kennedy won the election that year.

Republican presidential candidate Nixon campaigns in New York in 1960.

Nixon addresses supporters after winning his party's nomination again in 1968. He went on to defeat the Democratic nominee, incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

First lady Pat Nixon, center, watches as her husband is sworn in as the 37th president of the United States by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren on January 20, 1969.

Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin laugh with President Nixon aboard the USS Hornet on July 24, 1969. The president was on hand to greet the astronauts after their splashdown in the Pacific.

In 1970, Nixon announces the invasion of Cambodia to the American public.

Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai toasts with Nixon during his trip to China in February 1972.

President Nixon, left, briefs the Congressional leadership in 1973 before his televised announcement of the ceasefire in the Vietnam War. From left are Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, House Majority Leader Tip O'Neill, Speaker of the House Carl Albert, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, House Minority Leader Gerald Ford, Vice President Spiro Agnew and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

In 1972, Nixon ran a successful re-election campaign. Gerald Ford, right, became his vice president when Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973.

Surrounded by family members, Nixon delivers his resignation speech on August 9, 1974. He stepped down after the Watergate scandal, which stemmed from a break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices during the 1972 campaign.

Nixon leaves the White House after his resignation over the Watergate scandal in 1974.

Former President Nixon is wired for a microphone on April 9, 1988, before the taping of the NBC television show "Meet the Press." It was his first appearance on the show since 1968.

Days after suffering a stroke, Nixon died in New York on April 22, 1994. A military honor guard carries Nixon's casket at the Stewart Air Force Base before the flight back to his hometown of Yorba Linda, California. His body was put on the same Boeing 707 that flew him home after his resignation.

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STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Republicans raise prospect of impeachment and Dems use it for fundraising

Julian Zelizer: Both parties are using a serious process as a partisan tool

He says there's no serious case to be made against President Obama for impeachment

Zelizer: 40 years ago, the U.S. saw how the Watergate case made impeachment very relevant

Editor's note:Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of the forthcoming book, "The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress and the Battle for the Great Society"
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) -- Republicans and Democrats have entered into an impeachment frenzy over the past few weeks.

The impeachment wars began when a small group of Republicans started to make noise about the possibility of impeaching President Obama. The most high profile of the bunch was former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

In her characteristic way of getting right to the partisan point, Palin published an article on Breitbart.com in which she said, without specifying the exact grounds for her argument beyond her sense of a "lawless" president, that, "It's time to impeach."

Julian Zelizer

Palin was not alone. Several Republicans in Congress had mentioned the possibility of impeachment in the spring, including Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann and Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert. On the Sunday morning talk shows, Majority Whip Steve Scalise refused to rule it out. Some observers believe that, even though he has denied the GOP will pursue this option, Speaker of the House John Boehner has fueled the fires by filing a lawsuit against the President over his use of executive power.

Democrats have responded by using the threat of impeachment as a fundraising tool. They have blasted out a series of e-mails to supporters asking for money, warning that if Democrats don't do well in the midterm elections in November, the next two years will bring a revival of the late-1990s when House Republicans voted to impeach President Bill Clinton.

In one of the messages from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the "Red Alert" warning said the speaker's lawsuit "has opened the door to impeachment," according to the White House, and that the Washington Post confirmed Boehner refused to "say impeachment is off the table."

Indeed, White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer said he would "not discount the possibility" of impeachment while the White House press secretary agreed there were some Republicans "who are running for office, hoping that they can get into office so that they can impeach the President."

An impeachment conspiracy?

The parties are playing games with impeachment, an unfortunate and dangerous development.

The impeachment process is meant to be a tool of last resort, a constitutional mechanism through which Congress has the capacity to remove a president who has engaged in criminal behavior, committing "treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors."

When it is simply not possible to wait until the next presidential election to resolve the question of whether someone who has committed serious offenses should be in the White House, this is the only tool Congress has at its disposal.

Forty years ago, Congress turned to impeachment when confronted with a president, Richard Nixon, who brazenly used executive power to obstruct an investigation into wrongdoing within his administration surrounding the break-in at the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex. Congress never reached the point of voting to impeach him, though they would have, only because Nixon resigned 40 year ago this week.

At other times "impeachment" has been much more of a political tool. Often impeachment has been a threat used by opponents of a public figure. Starting in 1961, conservative activists famously carried signs calling for the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, whose court made landmark progressive rulings on issues like school segregation and the rights of crime suspects. "Save Our Republic: Impeach Earl Warren," their banners said.

During Reconstruction, "Radical Republicans" attempted to impeach Republican President Andrew Johnson for having violated the Tenure of Office Act. The real reason behind their drive to impeach was a frustration with Johnson's failure to enforce the Reconstruction Acts and disagreements with him over how to handle race relations in the post-Civil War period.

Most famously, and most relevant to many Republicans who are terrified about their colleagues carrying this too far, the heated partisan climate of the 1990s culminated with the House Republicans voting to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying under oath about the facts in a case involving his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

The Senate Republicans pulled the Congress back from the brink of convicting Clinton and removing him from office. As Boehner and other Republicans remember, the impeachment backfired on the GOP as Clinton's approval ratings skyrocketed and theirs plummeted.

During George W. Bush's presidency, some Democrats called for impeachment based on allegations he had misused executive authority and tricked the public into a war based on the false premise of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction.

The current use of impeachment as a political tool comes at a time when all parts of the legislative process seem subject to politicization. Nothing seems to be off limits. In 2011, the nation witnessed how the decision to raise the debt ceiling, the routine process through which Congress agreed to pay for spending that they authorized, became a volatile political weapon used to extract compromises over spending cuts with the draconian threat of sending the nation, and the world, into economic chaos if Obama did not comply.

Now we are seeing the same with impeachment, though still in the earliest of stages. But it is important for the leaders of both parties to push back and resist the temptation of reliving the 1990s and using this mechanism as yet another tool in the partisan wars.

Fortunately, the nation has not needed to use the impeachment tool very often. Generally mechanisms such as congressional oversight and Justice Department prosecutors have been sufficient to contain presidential misbehavior.

That doesn't satisfy the harshest Republican critics of President Obama. They claim he has misused executive power in making adjustments in the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, such as delaying the employer mandate.

Some also say he has failed to enforce immigration control legislation. Ironically, though Republicans stood by President George W. Bush when he deployed executive power on matters of national security and domestic policy, they now claim that President Obama is circumventing Congress in excessive fashion.

The complaints about growing executive power are clearly worthy of debate. Indeed, both parties, who seem to love presidential power when they have it but hate it the rest of the time, should engage in a serious discussion about what has happened to the balance of power in recent decades. But thus far what the Republicans have alleged against President Obama does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense.

Yet as Nixon reminds us, it is not impossible to imagine a situation where the nation will need the impeachment process again.

In 1986 and 1987, the Iran Contra scandal raised the impeachment question when it became clear that high-level national security advisers had consciously violated congressional prohibitions on providing aid to the Nicaraguan rebels. President Ronald Reagan ultimately was not impeached because there was no "smoking gun" showing Reagan knew the violations were happening. Yet the tool could have become essential.

Impeachment will lose its legitimacy within the public if it becomes a totally politicized process. While it is foolish to imagine that it is possible to ever contain the forces of partisanship, there need to be some limits and political leaders need to draw some lines in the sand.

As we remember the events that resulted in Richard Nixon having to step down, the anniversary should be a powerful and important reminder to our nation's leaders to keep their hands off the impeachment tool so that Congress can turn to it only in a true case of emergency.